What can you do in a month without excuses?

What’s My Goal Again?

The whole reason I even came up with No Excuses November was to motivate myself to move forward on a project I had been stalled on. I thought that if I was working on it everyday, I would have something to show for by the end of November.

My great master plan for NoExNo was to write a screenplay. My goal of 4 pages a day, for 30 days, was my attempt to write 120 pages in November. 120 pages is the length of a feature-length screenplay.

In the beginning of NoExNo, everything was going just as planned. Almost all of my writing had to do with the screenplay. Then I started working on Pep Talks and emails, and I began shifting my energy toward those instead.

Even still, I found that drafting Pep Talks and emails proved beneficial to my daily writing routine. And by “routine” I mean “sit down to write at 7, don’t actually start until 10, and finally finish at close to should-have-been-asleep-hours-ago o’clock.” In any case, it was nice to add a little variety to what I was working on for the month.

However, as of today, I haven’t touched my screenplay for five days. What have I been working on instead? Personal essays, guest articles, a flood of superfluous Facebook status updates (sorry), and NoExNo mail.

But something interesting happened. In the midst of trying to work on ONE project, I came up with and worked on MANY. In fact, I even came up with two new stories I wanted to write.

So what does this mean? Does it mean I’m a failure for not accomplishing what I originally set out to do? I’m reluctant to say yes.

While my purpose of doing NoExNo was to make significant strides in my screenplay, I still wrote. I created. I thought of ideas I had never entertained before. I worked and I saw results. It’s hard for me to see that as a bad thing.

From what I’ve seen happen within the group, a similar thing has occurred. We are changing our goals, or rather, letting them change as we understand them better. Maybe you are making your goal smaller, or maybe you are adding even more to your plate. It doesn’t matter– because you still have goals you are working toward.